A Scuba Diving Vacation Allows for Adventure
Make the most of your vacation by getting up close and personal with everything the ocean has to offer: coral reefs, aquatic plants, and a plethora of colorful fish and other wildlife. Scuba diving provides an experience that is simply unlike any other.
The adventure of scuba diving will leave you grinning from ear to ear for the remainder of your vacation, and may even turn into a life-long passion and hobby! Many people take the experience of scuba diving and run with it, making sure it's something they do every vacation and in a ton of different locations.
Depending on your level of certification, there are many different things to do while scuba diving. You can explore abandoned shipwrecks and plane crashes, see all kinds of different iconic locations from reefs to underwater statues and graveyards, and experience the wonder of seeing all kinds of different wildlife, from stingrays to dolphins.
Needed Scuba Certifications
In order to rent gear and go out on a boat with a reputable scuba diving company, you'll have to first be certified. At a minimum, it takes three or four days to become certified, but can take up to weeks depending on what your diving goals are.
There are always debates about which training agency is "the best," but the two most popular agencies are PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and SSI (Scuba Schools International).
The academic aspect of becoming certified is available to do via eLearning. After that's completed, you'll need to venture onto the next steps: confined water diving and open water diving. Throughout the certification process, you'll start by learning how to use your gear, which includes a snorkel, mask, fins, regulator, tank, and buoyancy control device.
You will then learn how to use your equipment, read your gages, control your movements, etc. Beginning divers stay as shallow as 60 feet, while more experienced divers can dive up to 130 feet deep.
Popular Scuba Diving Vacation Destinations
If you’ve developed a love of Scuba, then there’s a lot of places that you can go to enjoy a vacation. Many unique and wonderful things await you in the depths! Some fo the best places include:
- Barracuda Point in Malaysia is a popular scuba diving destination, where you're guaranteed to see lots of ocean wildlife. From the obvious barracuda, to sharks, turtles, grouper. and even bumphead parrotfish.
- Kailua Kona, Hawaii offers a once-in-a-lifetime experience of night diving with massive manta rays. These rays are drawn to the area by plankton, who are drawn by lights placed on the ocean floor. These rays are so focused on snacking that they don't notice the scuba divers, meaning you may get to say you got shoulder checked by a stingray!
- Ship and plane wrecks are popular diving destinations, and there's a popular one in Indonesia. It's the remains of the USAT Liberty, located in Bali. This shipwreck is completely engulfed in wildlife such as nemone, gorgonians and corals, and is also home to a hawksbill turtle.
- For a colder (but just as majestic) scuba diving vacation destination, you can go to Norway and witness pods of orcas swimming along the coast from October to February.
- To visit what many describe as "scuba diving paradise," you'll want to book a vacation to the Maldives. The Maldives consists of 1200 islands surrounded by white sand and crystal clear waters. You're guaranteed to see whale sharks and manta rays while enjoying the beautiful water, which is calmest between December and March.
